This Old Heart of Mine

by Thomas Berger

  Reinhart interrupted Fedder at that point. “Just what branch of the service were you in?” There were perhaps countless better questions, but this was in no sense a substitute for them, or evidence that Reinhart was nonplussed: at that moment he had a serious interest in the man’s service record, with an idea that were Fedder a combat veteran he might have some small excuse for his outrages: being cuckolded by a hero was surely better than by a 4-F.

  But Fedder’s voice rose triumphantly over Reinhart’s inquiry: he was an absolutely invincible fanatic when it came to sewers, and Reinhart’s only comfort lay in supposing that if this was the sort of thing “Jenny” found fascinating, so much the worse for her.

  “—insufficient for a community of the size of Vetsville. The problem is simply this: we have outgrown bur pipes!” Fedder positively shouted for joy, as if it were an accomplishment to produce more sewage than the next guy. He himself produced more perspiration than most; he was gushing water like a statue in a public fountain. “Now this is the procedure: we petition the town council to—”

  A howl of engine and a squeal of tires announced the return of the Gigantic, out front, and no doubt the return of Genevieve logically followed—at the moment, though, Reinhart was not as much impressed by that event as by Fedder’s reaction to it: the neighbor broke off the rant about his precious sewer and bent forward, turning his eager muzzle in the direction of the car-noise.

  “Is that—” Fedder began, but before he could say “Jenny” again, Reinhart’s shoes caught him hard in the buttocks, launching him on a brief flight. He met the earth like a cat, paw-breaking his descent rather gracefully.

  What Fedder did post-fall, Reinhart couldn’t have said, for the counterfeit writer had turned away from his adversary and gone to meet his wife. He no sooner rounded the corner of the Quonset than she saw him through the windshield.

  “Come here and take these packages!” she ordered shrilly. She had changed to a pair of striped shorts that verged on the brazen: a close observer could almost have seen her discreets. This was a mother-elect. Nevertheless, Reinhart did as told and gathered an armload of bundles from the front seat, his strategy being to continue for a while to pay out rope to her. The packages felt like food.

  “You haven’t been getting enough to eat?” he asked with a faint sneer. “I’m not a good provider—is that what you’re saying?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” answered Genevieve, twitching her hip. “I’m just going to do something on my own for a change.” She piled more parcels on top of those he already held, obstructing his view, then led him into the hut like a blind man. He craftily bided his time, doing an excellent job of transport, unloaded carefully on the drainboard of the kitchen sink, and began to unwrap item by item in search of perishables that should be refrigerated without delay.

  “You can let that go,” Gen said authoritatively.

  “But I always—” Reinhart began in wonder.

  “I said,” said Gen, “I’m going to do something on my own for a change. Didn’t you understand?” Suddenly she produced a pack of cigarettes, popped one out, lighted it, smoked it furiously once, coughed terribly, put it out under a drizzle of water from one of the taps—which for some reason affected Reinhart like the scraping of metal on concrete—and dropped the butt soggily into the sink, abandoning it there.

  “Ugh,” was the sound Reinhart made, staring at the butt. He was helplessly aware that he became more and more plaintive. For example, he found it impossible at this time to charge her with frequenting Fedder: she might have some ruinously good justification. After all, under the regime of Carlo I, it was true, her functions tended to be perhaps too severely circumscribed. Probably he could delegate certain powers to her without damaging her character, though of course he relied on her understanding that such errors as he had committed could be laid at the door of too much, rather than too little, love. And what about the baby? He wished he could talk to Maw about what she did while pregnant with him, but that subject conjoined with that individual resulted in his always feeling at once curiously weak and preposterously misinformed.

  He said subtly: “Oh, I almost forgot to mention. The guy from next door was over. He seems to be a friend of yours.”

  Gen pushed him aside and began herself to unwrap the packages. From one of them she extricated a great crown roast of beef, its standing ribs wearing little paper pantaloons; from another, an armload of asparagus. There were other goodies in the same vein, scarcely less expensive, and several bottles of the highest type of booze: wine from France and his old friend Courvoisier. Putting the fruit into the refrigerator, she withdrew from it the box of Camembert that Reinhart had just placed there.

  “No, no, no,” she said. “Must let it ripen. … Oh yeah, the man from next door was over yesterday and left a petition for you to sign. I stuck it in the bookcase.”

  Is that all? murmured Reinhart to himself. It was probably what she would have said had there been more—but could a wife be disloyal who planned such lordly meals for her spouse?

  “He’s quite a jerk, isn’t he?” Reinhart asked happily, trying to fit a long, thin loaf of bread into their short, squat breadbox. Nothing would serve but cutting it in two.

  “Noooo,” screamed Genevieve, causing him to drop the knife. “Are you out of your mind?” But it was rather a defense of the loaf than of Fedder; she demanded in the name of freshness that it be kept whole.

  “I trust you’ll shave sometime this afternoon,” she said after the disposition of the food. The last item, for which she let water into a vase, was a bouquet of yellow and white flowers, which, centered on the card table, changed the character of their home; from a machine for living it had become a house of love and light.

  “Gen, if you can do it, so can I. I apologize,” said Reinhart. Yet he still did not feel up to telling the truth about Melville’s-Splendor’s-his short story. “You know,” he said facetiously, with a sweep of the arm to symbolize the marvelous dinner they would have before nightfall, the first ever prepared by his wife, “quarreling is not so bad when it ends with this kind of reconciliation.” Then, as a man will when one thing goes well, he looked for supporting pleasures, and thought of how he had kicked Fedder’s ass for what turned out to be no greater crime than promoting a sewer.

  He was laughing out loud at the blindness of justice when Gen said: “What are you babbling about? I’ve invited my family to dinner.”

  Chapter 14

  “Call me Blaine,” said Genevieve’s father over his brandy, coffee, and panatella. He alternated sips of one or the other with puffs at the third, at which moments his eyes were smugly slitted. If already in April he had had a tan, he now was dark as Splendor Mainwaring—indeed it was difficult for Reinhart to see more of him across the table than eyes and teeth, in the candlelight Gen had provided.

  Now, it was once true that you could be accepted into Reinhart’s trust by no more than calling for the use of Christian names, but not since he discovered it was an obligation rather than a privilege. Besides, his father-in-law had so far called him nothing at all, while eating great quantities of the food that Gen may have chosen but Reinhart had to pay for.

  Gen’s mother was present, too—somewhere in the shadows on the right side of the card table: a person of her type was all but eradicated by candlelight. Of the family, only the estimable Kenworthy was missing; he had indeed run off to the Navy. Otherwise, the clan was strategically placed for an explosion of the water heater: bang, virtually no more Ravens, whereas the Reinharts would have lost only Carlo.

  “The name,” Raven went on, “has been in my family for generations but it is always given only to firstborn males. It is an exclusive privilege, there having been only six of us since the seventeenth century. However, the tendency of our women is to be spirited and willful, and the line I think has not suffered but—”

  “Really!” said Reinhart, doing his best to get along. “You mean that there have been only six men in the fam
ily since—”

  “Silennnnnce,” ordered his father-in-law, and the two women gasped, Genevieve actually kicking Reinhart’s ankle. But Raven smiled with his perfect range of teeth and explained: “In our house we get everything right first time out. Firstborn males is what was said. And if our Gen hasn’t put you straight by this time, you might want to know we sunk our roots on this continent in 1659, when the first American Blaine Raven, ex-lieutenant of Oliver Cromwell, left his native shores after the death of the great Lord Protector and sailed westward on the brigantine Sobriety, touching Plymouth harbor some three and a half months later.”

  A candle almost went out in the gale of his expelled cigar smoke. Perhaps because the brandy was in a water goblet, he mistook it for iced tea; anyway, he threw it down in one swallow and dabbed at his bronze lip with a paper serviette, crumpling it when he finished and hurling it over his shoulder, as Charles Laughton did bones in the movie about Henry VIII. There was no doubt he had style. Genevieve hastily filled his goblet from the flask of Courvoisier, with its big belly that reminded Reinhart of her condition.

  Reinhart, incidentally, was radiant with euphoria; he hated being on bad terms with people, and now that he got along with his father-in-law and that the little misunderstanding with Gen was cleared up, he had only to return the MS to Splendor with a blunt note, give Fedder some simple explanation for the rump-kick (“I have a nervous ailment”), and all his problems were solved. He buoyantly tossed off his own brandy. In crossing her legs, Gen kicked his shin again.

  “That first Blaine,” the latest one continued, “had been a Sussex landowner in England, very handsomely well-to-do. It is all wrong, you know, to think that all the best folk were with the Royalists and the slobs with Cromwell. Far from it. The only real issue there was religious. The Ravens have always despised Catholics, be they even kings!” He smote the card table with the flat of his hand, with the other one protecting the brandy bottle from the vibration.

  Reinhart’s mother-in-law spoke in her mousy voice, startling everyone and infuriating Raven. “I think it depends on the individual.”

  “Watch yourself,” Raven warned, and flicked a great bread crumb in her direction.

  “Help yourself to the Courvoisier, Daddy,” said Gen.

  “We Ravens never drink anything else but,” he noted, rolling his shoulders from front to rear. He wore a knitted sport shirt, lemon yellow, so tight that it might have been sprayed on him in liquid form. His blazer he had earlier removed. “May I compliment you on your choice of dinner wine.” He sucked his tongue, frowned, and looking at the corrugated ceiling, said: “Château Margaux … and the year is …”

  “One moment,” said Reinhart, playing Helpful Harry, “I’ll go look at the bottle in the trashcan.”

  Again the women gasped, and again he saw his father-in-law’s cruel smile.

  “That’s all right, all right,” Raven said after a moment, threw down another drink, dried his lips with another napkin and pitched it over his back. “The year is … Nineteen forty-three,” he finished rapidly.

  “Right-o, Daddy,” crooned Genevieve. “You never miss.”

  Good old Reinhart, getting a bit high, assumed this was a joke, because before the arrival of the elder Ravens, Gen told him Daddy had ordered her to serve Château Margaux ‘43 when he came to dinner. “That was the great one,” she had said in explication, “and Daddy refuses anything but the best.”

  “He never will miss,” said Reinhart now, winking at his father-in-law. “He knows the script.”

  “No, that’s all right,” Raven said to Gen, interrupting her remonstrance. He put his hand on her wrist. “I don’t mind him. He hasn’t penetrated the skin—yet.” He turned slanted eyes and white fangs towards his son-in-law. “But when you do, mister, I promise to let you know.”

  Reinhart was still not sure how much of this was in fun; but if the Ravens were as vintage a lot as they made out, their wit was certain to be high and fine, just as his tended to be coarse. He chewed the end of his cigar, and as soon as Gen’s glare was off him, seized the brandy bottle and refilled his glass, which was none too big, having lately held chipped beef.

  “Where was I?” asked Raven, his sneer shading off into a solipsist grimace of the type people sometimes wear on public buses: they are aware only that they exist and life is mean.

  “The first American Blaine Raven,” said Reinhart.

  “What do you know about him?” shouted his father-in-law. “What did you do in the war? Were you in the Corps?” He picked up one of the crackers accompanying the dessert cheese and hurled it at his wife, who ducked neatly.

  For a moment Reinhart was paralyzed because of the sudden breakdown of convention. Then he snatched up a missile of his own—the leftover cork from the wine—and was preparing to fire it at the brute when Gen burst into a sob and ran from the table. Going after her, Reinhart fell over a piece of furniture, for it was quite dark, the Ravens having come two hours late. What an outrage in Reinhart’s own house! He picked himself off the floor and caught Genevieve at the screen door.

  “Shh!” he warned, indicating Fedder’s hut next door.

  “Who cares?” Gen asked, her face all tearfully pinched. “Everything’s gone wrong. Thank you for ruining my evening.”

  It didn’t take Reinhart long to decide that her condition took precedence over his sense of fair play. “I’ll be good,” he promised, but while saying it, looking over Gen’s shoulder at the candlelit table, he saw his father-in-law throw a whole handful of crackers into his mother-in-law’s face.

  “Gen, Gen,” he whispered, drawing her outside onto the little duckboard-platform that posed as a porch. “Gen, now keep calm, but your father’s in there right now mistreating your mother. Don’t you think we’d better take the booze away from him?”

  Her face caught some light from Fedder’s windows. “They’ve been kidding around like that for years.”

  “Isn’t it strange?”

  “Well, I don’t think so,” Gen replied. “You know, if I wanted to, I could say something about hypochondriacs, but I won’t.”

  Reinhart’s frustration inflated his head. “Look, I don’t want to argue about our families. This is an emergency.” Thinking of her pregnancy, he hastily added: “But I don’t want you to worry.”

  “I’m not worrying,” she answered loftily. “You just don’t seem to understand anyone with spirit. Only a clod is even-tempered at all times.”

  “You mean me,” Reinhart said in aggrieved stoicism.

  “Let’s put it this way, Carl,” Genevieve said softly, “in everybody there’s room for improvement. Everybody. We all should become more than what we started as.”

  “Listen here!” he shouted, and then lowered his voice for the rest, for although his emotion continued to rise, his caution did too. That he was never really unilateral, he felt, saved him from unconditional disasters. “Listen here,” he whispered, “the only kind of aristocracy I believe in is the natural one.”

  “That’s just what I’m saying,” Gen whispered back. “Not everyone can be born into a family like Daddy’s, but there are other compensations. One can develop grace and style and exquisite manners.”

  “Hahaha,” jeered Reinhart. “You mispronounced the word.” But he felt no real glee.

  “That’s a good example. Among the better class of people, you don’t correct someone’s English. Do you know why? Because if they say it, it’s automatically right.”

  “They have to be pretty good people,” said Reinhart through clenched teeth. He was seething: to be instructed by a slip of a girl who had never been to college! An educated man knew that to any genuine haut monde, American “aristocracy” was a vulgar joke; the original John Jacob Astor, for example, was a Kraut from Heidelberg, Germany, who came to this country and swapped beads for fur with the Indians, no doubt speaking in a clownish accent.

  Nevertheless, Reinhart was determined to make every effort to do his part. From where he sto
od the worst thing you could be called was unfair. So he said: “You mean like Roosevelt, who pronounced “decadent” deck-a-dunt and everybody else has followed suit though it doesn’t make sense when you think that the word has the same derivation as “decay.”

  Genevieve brushed that aside with: “Be that as in May—”

  “What?”

  “Now don’t correct me. I know what I’m saying.”

  “Yes, but I don’t,” said Reinhart.

  “I’m sorry, Carl. Goodness knows I have tried, but your sarcasm is really too much. Added to your lack of breeding, your lack of sensitivity—well, you may be brilliant, but that is not enough. There must be heart as well as head. But besides that, how does so much education help you in the art of living?”

  Reinhart lowered his head and said tragically: “You never told me any of this before. I am absolutely astonished, Genevieve; it was you who wanted to get married. For your sake I gave up my freedom at twenty-one years of age, and this is how you repay me.”

  “I gave you enough rope,” said Genevieve, drawing back as if from a bad odor, “and here is what I found.” She began to enumerate the particularities of his failure, placing her thumb on her little finger, in rather masculine, decidedly common style, the fashion in which a garage mechanic tells you four things that must be done to your Dodge before winter or he won’t be responsible. Similarly, so she implied, Genevieve was nothing but a detached and expert observer of their marriage, hired as it were to gauge his performance.

  The lights went off in the next-door Quonset: Fedder, ass that he may be, was realistic enough to keep on good terms with his frau, and bedded with her at a reasonable hour. Elsewhere in Vetsville there were instances of modest revelry: an old college song on the night air, controlled laughter, the clunk of an empty beer can striking the bottom of a trash barrel. This was a harmless population.

  “First,” Genevieve was saying, resting the small of her back against the little porch rail of one-inch waterpipe, “you try to hide with a great deal of nervous energy the fact that you have no real ambition. You do twice the required amount of college homework, but could do half and get farther if you had a direction—which you don’t. Who cares if you read all the Iliad or whatever old book? Why don’t you study accounting or something useful?”